


now i'm covered in you

by 26stars



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Hanahaki Disease, Heteronormativity occasionally at work, Jemma is a clueless bi, Pining, Season 1 era, Terminal illness diagnosis, the pod and fitz's trauma are referenced
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:02:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29263986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/26stars/pseuds/26stars
Summary: Jemma Simmons has been coughing for weeks by the time she realizes her diagnosis. There are three ways this can end, and all of them require pain.Jemma has Hanahaki AU. Fills my marvel femslash bingo square for 'terminal illness'
Relationships: Jemma Simmons/Skye | Daisy Johnson
Comments: 14
Kudos: 69
Collections: Femslash February, Women of the MCU





	now i'm covered in you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [accio-the-force (XOLove47)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/XOLove47/gifts).



> Happy ending I promise.
> 
> Special thanks for Lauren for the title help!

Jemma Simmons, PhD, PhD, had of course researched every possible cause of her symptoms as soon as they’d started. A persistent tickle in the throat that quickly turned into a persistent cough, which had turned into a hacking cough that ejected small fragments of something white and bloodstained. She had been so horrified at first that she had simply disposed of the sputum immediately in the proper biohazard method and upped her DayQuil intake, but after a mid-experiment coughing fit left her holding a latex-gloved handful of the substance alone in the Bus’s lab, she had taken a (labored) deep breath and then applied all her testing methods to the sample:

The blood was her own, but the white fragments were foreign. Not her own tissue.

 _What are they, how did they get there, and how can I get them out?_ she had thought immediately. More tests revealed the fragments to be bits of _Bellis perennis_ , the common European daisy.

_Flowers._

_In my lungs._

_So it’s true, then._

Even though she’d seen isolated studies in medical journals, Jemma had never truly believed what she’d read about Hanahaki disease—it had always sounded to fantastical to be possible. The disease had, of course, come up on a list of possible ailments when she was originally researching her symptoms. But now, confronted with a clear case in her very own body, Jemma knew she couldn’t deny facts any longer. After disposing of the samples and cleaning her hands thoroughly, she went to her computer and pulled up the article she’d dismissed before, the one with the most comprehensive study done on this affliction thus far.

_Patients exhibit consistent pulmonary irritation…advanced stages show reduced lung function, frequent coughing of flower debris and pulmonary tissue…four clear stages witnessed…only effective treatment seen is surgical removal of the flowers and their sources, which results in a complete physical recovery…post-op studies show now recurrence after surgery…some patients have expressed regret over the surgery…see Mead’s study of Hanahaki, (Section 8, par 53)._

Jemma read the psychological study next, and, because she couldn’t help herself, she read the message boards referenced in the Works Cited. And with her scientific thought processes, she boiled everything down to a painful abstract:

The affliction would continue until one of three things happened: first, her soulmate could come to love her back. In that case, the affliction would cure itself, and the flowers in her lungs would be reabsorbed until they were only a memory. The second option was having the flowers surgically removed—the studies proved that as long as they were cut out by the roots, the disease would not relapse. But the psychological study and the message boards echoed the tandem result that she would have to accept along with the cure: if she cut out the flowers, she would never be able to feel love for her soulmate again, no matter how their feelings towards Jemma were.

The third option was to allow the disease to run its course. Untreated Hanahaki had a one-hundred percent mortality rate when coupled with unreciprocated love.

This disease guaranteed pain, no matter how it ended.

In some ways, there was choice, and yet it at the same time, there wasn’t. Jemma could choose the surgery, but she could not choose for the object of her affections to return her love.

And the idea of losing any hope of a future was more than Jemma could bear.

So she kept coughing up petals and stuffing them in biohazard bins, washing her hands of the blood and trying to assure Fitz that her chronic cough was just a result of allergies to whatever allergen source was convenient at the time.

The cough had started so long after she met Fitz that she knew he wasn’t to blame.

It had started the day their team had met a girl named Skye and a man named Mike.

~

Her team sees Mike again months after their first meeting, and he looks even better than the first time they’d met. Fit and strong, but without the black cloud of despair and barely-controlled panic he’d been exuding the first time around. Jemma remembered exactly where the “Night-night gun’s” first test round had hit him, the way she’d seen his skin flash from red to blue beneath his natural color, the relief she’d felt when she’s fallen on him and felt for a pulse and found it still there…

Skye had stayed with their team since then, but Mike had been sent to a SHIELD facility to be treated for the Centipede serum’s side effects and, eventually, be trained in his newfound powers. When their team picks him up for a mission a few months after their first, Jemma beams at the sight of him, a fact she can feel Fitz enjoying at her expense more than once. Skye, who had a very different experience with Mike the first time around, keeps her distance while Jemma and Fitz work with Mike, and though Jemma keeps trying to make friendly conversation, Mike seems rather oblivious of her fascination with him.

When they see him disappear in flames just a minute after Coulson is abducted however, Jemma is too shocked to know what to think.

Skye is in charge of Ace until they get in touch with his next of kin and shuttle them off to a secure location, and Jemma is so preoccupied with finding Coulson that she doesn’t notice at first that her cough has not disappeared.

Which can only mean that Mike is still alive somewhere.

~

They eventually find Coulson but not Mike, and only a couple of weeks later, they have a lead on a Cybertek shipment passing through Italy. It’s all hands on deck for this mission, and though Jemma is paired with Coulson for her leg, she ends up waking up alone in a trunk in the mail car of their train. The senior agents find her and follow the lead to the mansion that Fitz and Skye have tailed Ian Quinn to.

Inside, they find Quinn with blood on his hands.

Downstairs, they find Skye.

~

The hyperbaric chamber seemed too providential to believe, and Jemma will not know why it was there until Skye makes it through three heart-wrenching days lingering within an inch of death. Jemma watches over her all the way into surgery, keeps vigil in the waiting room, and then does not leave her side from the moment she is released to Coulson’s care. Back on the Bus with Skye in her hospital bed in a medical pod installed in the cargo level of the plane, it takes Jemma several hours to notice that her cough has gotten worse.

Inconveniently, May is at her elbow when the worst coughing fit yet takes Jemma, forcing her away from Skye’s bedside and out into the hall.

“That doesn’t look good, Simmons,” May says quietly at her elbow as Jemma tries to conceal a newly-produced pile of flower fragments in the black handkerchief she’s taken to carrying around with her for this such need.

“I know, but there’s nothing to be done,” Jemma mutters once she’s got her breath back.

May looks like she knows far more than she’s saying. “Have you told them how you feel?” she murmurs, barely loud enough to be heard, and Jemma shakes her head before she remembers to deny, deny, deny…

“I haven’t had the chance.”

May puts a hand briefly on her arm. “You’ve got dried blood on your lips. Maybe consider starting to wear lipstick to hide it.”

While their men plunge into a mountain, looking for a miracle cure for Skye, Jemma, Trip, and May are both there to force her heart to beat, to keep her body from giving up…

“Have you known her long?” the acquaintance of an agent asks at one point.

“A few months,” Jemma says, breathing shallowly so that he won’t hear her wheeze. “We have nothing in common couldn't be more different…” She stares at the woman and runs out of words the same time she runs out of breath.

“But you can't imagine your life without her,” Agent Triplett finishes for her, and Jemma nods, coughing a little behind the sanitary mask she’d donned an hour ago.

When Fitz races in with the miracle drug, Jemma does not hesitate for a second to plunge it into Skye’s veins, and she is quick enough that Coulson’s sudden change of heart comes far too late. Skye seizes one more time, then stabilizes, and Jemma holds onto her worst coughing fit yet until she can lock herself in the lavatory and let it out.

Into the sink, she retches an entire blood-spattered daisy blossom.

_Stage three._

With Skye stable, Jemma now has room to feel afraid for herself.

Her friend wakes up the next morning, and the first thing she rasps when she sees Jemma is,

“Mike’s alive.”

~

The team sees Mike again, a few weeks down the road, but there is too much going on for Jemma to give much thought to his presence apart from fear that Garrett will order Mike— _Deathlok_ , as they’re calling him now—to kill her and Fitz. In the end, it’s Ward who gets the order, and the last thing she sees as Skye’s former medical pod is ejected from the plane is his face, which is at least trying to look sorry about it.

When she comes to at the bottom of the ocean, Jemma immediately has a terrible coughing fit, and there’s no way to hide the petals and blossoms from Fitz when they come up, smeared with blood.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he whispers as she shoves them into a plastic bag, then douses her hands in rubbing alcohol to sanitize them.

“I didn’t want you to worry,” she says truthfully. “You’d told me about what happened to your parents.”

One of them, not liking the feeling of weakness, had had the surgery to cure Hanahaki. When the pair had eventually come together and married anyway, the union was already doomed.

Even in the dim light, Jemma can see the paleness in Fitz’s face.

“But Jemma…” He can’t finish the sentence, but she thinks he’s trying not to say, “…what about you and me?”

“You know I love you too, Fitz. I didn’t choose this.”

Fitz isn’t looking at her. “It started when we got on the Bus…but who is it? Ward?”

“God, no, Fitz. I think…I thought it was Mike for a long time. But…but we’re down here now, and he’s not the person I’m thinking about.”

“Who then?”

She has to pause to cough painfully again. There’s a fresh daisy in her hand when she looks up again. “I think it’s Skye.”

Fitz closes his eyes, looking so much sorrier than Ward just did. She tries to catch her breath, preparing words to comfort him again, but when he finally speaks again, his words aren’t what she expects.

“We’re going to get out of here, Jemma,” he promises quietly. “You have to tell her. We’ll find a way back to her.”

~

He makes her take the last breath of oxygen, even though she’s the one less likely to be able to hold onto it, with her lungs being semi-occupied. He won’t hear any of her protests about it, just smiles sadly at her and slams his hand down on the defibrillator’s switch.

The cannister forces it into her corrupted lungs, and Jemma hangs onto it with every fiber of her being as she drags him out of the pod by the collar, fighting her way through the sea towards the surface.

Towards the sky.

~

Skye runs into Jemma’s arms as the Bus’s ramp opens in the facility Fury had dropped her and Fitz off at earlier. Jemma holds on tight and tries not to cry, afraid that she’s already used up all her remaining courage for one day and resolved to not say anything else to Skye just now. Her team wants to see Fitz, needs to hear what happened, and Jemma doesn’t have a moment alone with Skye until she wakes up at Fitz’s bedside the next morning, immediately coughing up the night’s collected flower debris (like she has most mornings lately), and, unfortunately, Skye is there to see it.

“What happened?” she exclaims, apparently thinking this is the result of the previous day’s events. Jemma, choking for air, gags up another mouthful that she can’t quite conceal in her hands, and the buds and blossoms spill from her fingers to the floor.

Skye runs for help, and then the whole base knows.

It’s pointless for Jemma to hide the facts any more.

“What do you mean, _terminal?”_ Skye repeats, her face pale. Coulson is standing behind her, listening with a grave look on his face. May, the one who’d known the longest, stands just outside Fitz’s cubicle with her arms folded, ostensibly standing guard for them, though Jemma is certain that the woman is listening to every word.

“I mean, apart from surgery, there’s no effective treatment,” Jemma answers Skye once she has the air for it. Her voice is as raspy as it’s been since she woke up at the bottom of the sea. “But the surgery comes at a price that I’m not willing to pay.”

She explains as concisely as she can. Skye looks no less torn.

“But…can’t you just tell your soulmate that you love them? Why shouldn’t you?”

Jemma attempts to smile through the pain. “I could tell them, but that won’t make them love me back. Love and pity aren’t the same thing.”

Skye looks ready to cry or hit something, and she presses her palms to her brows.

“Let me at them, Jemma. If anyone doesn’t love you from the moment they meet you, they’re a damn fool.”

Jemma smiles, feeling a bit light-headed. _The disease must be much more advanced than I thought if the quantity of flowers is already reducing my oxygen intake to this degree…_

“Thank you Skye, you’re very kind.” She’s startled to hear that her voice is no longer raspy. She takes a deep breath. It goes further than it has in weeks, so she takes another, and another.

For the first time in months, it doesn’t feel like breathing through an ivy-covered wall.

At that moment, Skye lunges forward and pulls Jemma into her arms.

“I love you Jemma, and you just _have_ to find this person. We can’t lose you.”

Jemma holds her breath, something she didn’t think she’d ever want to do again after yesterday, but now she’s only marveling that it’s possible. That her lungs allow it. Over Skye’s shoulder, she makes eye contact with Coulson, and with one look, she knows he knows.

“May, come with me,” he orders, leading the woman away and leaving her and Skye alone in each other’s arms.

Jemma keeps breathing and holding onto Skye, trying to find some grain of courage again.

“Skye…” she whispers. “I love you.”

“I love you too, Jemma,” Skye responds immediately, holding her tighter. “I was so scared when we couldn’t find you, so scared when Garrett was taunting that you and Fitz were dead…”

Jemma closes her eyes and pulls in a breath that comes out a shudder, but only because she’s now near tears, tears she didn’t have the strength for yesterday. Skye pulls back when she realizes and fumbles for a tissue from the table beside Fitz, but Jemma only balls it into her hand.

_I can do this._

“Down there, in the pod at the bottom of the ocean,” she says, meeting Skye’s eyes bravely, “Fitz saw me cough up the flowers and I told him the truth. He asked who it was, and I admitted that for the longest time I’d thought it was one person. But down there, the person I was thinking of, hoping I would see again…” _Is Skye actually holding her breath?_ “…it was you.”

Skye looks startled, but it passes in a moment. She opens her mouth, looking for words or air, and eventually manages, “I always thought…you and Fitz…”

Jemma smiles sympathetically. “People tend to think that. It’s not your fault.”

Skye’s dark eyes have gone somber, raking over Jemma’s face.

“How are your lungs feeling now?” she whispers, as if all of this is too good to be true.

Jemma takes a deep, satisfying breath.

“Better,” she says, and Skye immediately surges forward.

Soon, Jemma runs out of air for a totally new reason.


End file.
